Beyond the Wrecking Ball: Using Community-Centered AI to Expand Federal Grant Access

The deployment of artificial intelligence in government is diverging into two distinct methodologies: one used to eliminate funding through ideological filtering and another designed to expand access for under-resourced communities.

In Spring 2025, staff from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) utilized ChatGPT to identify federally funded grants for elimination at the National Endowment for the Humanities. According to reports, the staff used a single prompt: Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’

This process resulted in the flagging of nearly every active award from the Biden administration, including a 40-volume scholarly series on the history of American music and a documentary regarding Jewish women forced into slave labor during the Holocaust. Within two weeks, this approach reduced the National Endowment for the Humanities budget by half.

Bridging the Federal Funding Gap

While some AI applications are being used to strip funding, other initiatives are leveraging the technology to help local governments secure the billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for infrastructure, public services, and community resilience.

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The difficulty in accessing these funds often stems from a lack of specialized staff in smaller municipalities. A state study in Massachusetts found that while its communities are eligible for approximately $17.5 billion in federal grants, less than 30% of that funding is successfully accessed by local governments.

Small towns often lack the budget for professional grant writers or consultants, leaving a single employee to manage multiple roles. This capacity gap often leads to missed deadlines or the discovery that a town is ineligible only after hours of reading dense, 100-page grant announcements.

The GrantWell Platform

To address these barriers, the Governor of Massachusetts launched GrantWell in March 2026. The free AI-powered platform, integrated into state infrastructure on mass.gov, was developed through a partnership between the state’s Federal Funds and Infrastructure Office and the AI for Impact program at Northeastern University.

GrantWell was developed using a community-centered AI approach, which involves building tools with the end-users—including tribal representatives and local officials—rather than for them. This process revealed that the primary obstacles were not just drafting applications, but identifying existing grants and determining eligibility.

The platform includes several technical features to streamline the process:

• A searchable database that aggregates federal and state funding opportunities.
• The generation of plain-language summaries of complex government documentation.
• A chatbot that provides answers derived directly from source text to minimize the risk of confabulation.
• A structured drafting workflow that creates initial versions for human grant writers to refine.

The tool is designed to support human workers rather than replace them; it does not submit applications on behalf of the user.

Industry Trends in Government AI

GrantWell is part of a broader trend of using AI to reduce friction in the federal funding landscape. Other platforms, such as Syncurrent, utilize AI to help tribal and local governments identify relevant state and federal funding opportunities, enabling small teams to operate at a higher capacity.

Similarly, the US Digital Response (USDR) has highlighted the importance of generative AI in helping small communities navigate confusing eligibility criteria and reporting requirements. USDR’s No Front Door research has identified structural barriers that make funding inaccessible to the smallest municipalities.

Expansion and Future Deployment

Following the Massachusetts launch, the GrantWell model is being explored for adoption by Colorado, California, and Rhode Island. Leadership from the Colorado Governor’s Office has indicated that reducing barriers to entry for grant seeking will allow their Federal Funds office to better scale its impact.

The AI for Impact program is also collaborating with multiple states to deploy additional tools, including a contract review tool and a procurement drafting tool. In Boston, the program has partnered with the city to roll out a tool that helps residents explore and utilize open municipal data.

By convening states to share operational data and collaborating directly with frontline workers, the program aims to prevent the wasteful duplication of procurement and development costs across different state governments.